Further Musings

One of my former students caught his first NFL touchdown pass over the weekend.

He’s mostly a special teams player, where the hardest hits are often delivered.  I recall him getting knocked out in a UNC game.

Lest you think that my discussion of the concussion crisis is simply me looking for an ax to grind with the general culture I do have some personal connections.

It’s pretty serious and pretty scary, especially as I look out at the two players in my course this semester and wonder how they will live at age 40 or 50.

I’ve almost survived my first semester as a professor.  Whew.

The Times is running a long interview with former all-pro lineman Kris Jenkins.

He’s got no axes to grind.  He doesn’t regret his decision to play.

Yet his description of the physical brutality of the game is pretty amazing.

I hope the herbs, roots and pilates help to heal his broken body.

Donating all pants that are now two inches to big.  Gulp.  That’s putting money on what goes in my mouth in the future.

Can you tell I’m done grading?  Posting binge.

U2 posted this music video of a song off their new album on their website.  Thought I’d post it as I though the art was very beautiful.

Writing about it makes me wish I’d taken an art class at some point in my life so I could talk about what it is in the animation that strikes me as such.  The urbanness?  The simplistic depiction of the city’s buildings?  The unashamed love?

For now I’ll have to settle for . . . for .  . . simple, beautiful, and moving.

Despite living adjacent to five parking lots our backyard is an oasis of animal activity.  On any given day we boast a collection of cardinals, brown thrashers, robins, several squirrels, and our three neighborhood cats, who follow each other through their prowling routes.  We have seen owls, woodpeckers, deer (curse them), and chipmunks.  And now we can add snakes.  I haven’t made an id yet.  Any ideas?

Last year we took a good bit of time to seperate out the irises in the backyard and we got about four flowers.  This year we’ve had 40 flowers and they’ve been a spectacular and prolonged treat.  Amazingly we managed to blindly seperate out the white ones into their own bed and leave the yellow and purple.  They’ve been beautiful.

This year I’ll be endeavoring again to post a photo everyday for the month of December.  Thanks to Rebecca for organizing and I’m looking forward to both posting and watching the other entries.

. . . yawning, even though I’ve had two naps today.

. . . processing the David Brooks book I’ve been reading about what it means to be American.

. . . wondering what it means for me to work a job that doesn’t fit with my life goals.

. . . pondering what it means to have a vision of personal improvement, a set of goals, a set of tasks, that I have in my mind to always be improving upon.  Is that Christian?  American?  Me?

. . . griping about the bass I can hear over the Moby I’m listening to.

. . . wishing I hadn’t watched two episodes of McGyver and had cooked instead.

. . . deciding if have anything else to say.

Guess not

I’m sorting through boxes of school files tonight searching for my notes on welfare state retrenchment and expansion.  I’ve happened along a lot of random pieces of paper that I’ve stored up over the four years of graduate school.

Among them is this prayer on an old torn piece of paper that was once a bulletin.  It’s so old and beat up it almost qualifies as an artifact, and in a way it is: it’s all the way back from my year in Chicago which seems so far away, so other worldly and other me-ly, that it’s strange to hold an object from that testifies to me that I did live there.

Anyway, I’ll probably keep the piece of paper but just in case didn’t want to lose the prayer so it’s typed out below.

Lord Jesus, help me to understand the weight You carried on that long road to Jerusalem.  How much destruction did You see beyond the rubble of the Jerusalem temple?  How many nations did You see beating their plows into swords and their pruning hooks into spears?  How many Stalins and Hitlers did You see gathering darkly on the political horizon?

How many genocides did You witness because there was no peace between nations?  How many homicides, because there was no peace between neighbors?  How many suicides, because there was no peace in the human heart?  How much hatred did You see through Your tears?  Help me to see that Your tear were not just for Jerusalem but also for Rome, for Gettysburg, for Treblinka, for Hiroshima.

I pray for our world which Your Father cradles so closely to His heart.  A world that is on the brink of breaking apart, war-torn and weary.  A world that knows so little of the peace You offer.

Help me to know that Peace, O Lord, especially in my suffering.

Help me to understand the dark secret of love, the secret that only suffering can reveal:  that if I love long enough and deeply enough, someday my heart will be broken.  As Yours was broken.

Isaiah prophesied You would live among us as a broken-hearted Man, a Man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.  Help me to realize there are things, like the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy, that can only come to pass through suffering.  Like character and compassion.

Help me to understand that there is a communion with You that can only be shared through the sacrament of tears.

Ken Gire, “Moments with the Savior”

This year I’m participating again in the December Photo Project.  I’ll try to post a picture a day between now and Christmas.   Hopefully this will help me post a little more frequently this month.  Working my first full five day week plus hour commute each way last week I haven’t had many blogging thoughts.

Good question. Life’s been a bit interesting and full for the past couple of weeks. I’m ah . . . having some job shakeups that are proving to be interesting and time consuming.

We’ve also been traveling some as well. Two weekends ago we were in Charlottesville to visit my youngest sister Katie. She’s got a cool life and a cool gig with her house, roommates and job all nestled in the mountains.

This weekend we were hosting several house guests.   One of the highlights of the weekend  was our box seats for the UNC v. Miami football game. They’ll probably be the nicest seats I’ll ever sit in in a stadium: front row of the box peering straight down to the 40 yard-line from our padded seats . . . and with access to all the buffets the box provided. Throw in the company of my dad and two good friends plus a Carolina victory and it was pretty cool.

We leave for Amherst, MA in just seven days to see the house and life our dear friends the C’s have moved to. We’re excited to get away from the 93 degree heat of Chapel Hill and to sample the fare we’ve heard so much about.

Hopefully I’ll get some good posting in at some point.  I actually had a nice time journaling the other morning.  Perhaps I have some reflective thoughts left in this old body after all.

G&P

Bill Amend, creator of Foxtrot, has announced that on December 31 Foxtrot will become a Sunday only event.  Foxtrot has greeted me for every morning for the last 3+ years.  I loved the geeky Jason. I love the math puns.  I loved how in tune Amend has been with pop culture from a slightly geeky male perspective.

Foxtrot has made me smile many mornings and I’ll miss it.

Last night I tried to sit down and read a good novel . . . I skimmed our book shelves looking for just the right story to capture me. 

The Brothers K?  Still to present in my mind.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince?  Good but read that last week.

I skimmed the library books I brought home . . .

Season of Migration to the North?   The online plot summary still looks interesting but doesn’t scratch the itch I’m looking for.

I ended up reading a nice short story from a collection by Alice Munro.   I enjoyed it but I am a novel reader at heart.  It’s the novel that captures me.
So . . . can anyone recommend any good novels that they’ve been enjoying?  I’m in need of some good fiction.